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Bicycles - saddles sores - recumbents, its a vicious circle.
The fact one needs to ride a recumbent bicycle of some sort to alleviate pains of cycling is already a testament that bicycles are imperfect machines and will stay so.
This is because recumbent bicycles have their own set of disadvantages. Recumbents and uprights are neither better or worse than one another. It all depends on what you aim to use it for. There is no universal machine that is good at everything, but mediocre at best. I have studied recumbents and ridden many, and same with uprights. Recumbents are a set of compromises, and so are uprights. The solution to this would be to have a fleet of bicycles tailored to each specific need. But that is not going to happen. The average person is not going to want more than 1, maybe 2 bicycles. The success of the bicycle is not determined by how good it is for one specific purpose. It is determined by how good it handles in all the different situations one might come across in daily life. Busy traffic, gravel paths, slippery roads, long straight roads, etc. When one uses practicality and adaptability as the determining factor of succes, the convential bicycle wins. This is why you see recumbent bicycles only in developed countries, and specifically the most popular in the Netherlands. Only after- ONLy after a country has reached a high status of living and the cycling infrastructure has developed accordingly, recumbent bicycles start popping up- somewhat, in low quantities. (75 000 in the Netherlands, of a population of 17 000 000).
Recumbent bicycles desire a very high treshold of society if they aim to ever become popular. The majority of the world is not up to this standard. If every thing goes well it might be the case in the year 2200 that recumbents become popular.
